On this day in 1978 Janet Flanner died. For a half-century her bi-weekly "Letter From Paris" was published under her pen name, "Genet," in The New Yorker. These were afterwards collected in a handful of volumes, most notably Paris Journal, 1944-1965, which won a National Book Award in America. Flanner also wrote a novel (The Cubical City), and translated several of Colette's, but she is most famous for profiling the famous politicians, artists and events of her era in a new form and a unique style. In her preface to Paris Was Yesterday, Flanner says that when she started in 1925 the "only specific guideline I had received from the editor, Harold Ross, was his statement that he wanted to know what the French thought was going on in France, not what I thought was going on ... FULL STORY »
